Conflicted Interests

I kind of miss Alan Greenspan and Donald Rumsfeld. Not for any policy wonkery they inflicted on us, but for the endless turn-of-phrase, that each contributed to the language of describing the world around us. How can we forget Rumsfeld’s slog through Iraq and Afghanistan? It certainly has been a long hard slow pace of military action since 2003 hasn’t it? Then there was the known unknowns. Actually, there was more about things known or not known, and over at Slate, someone managed to put Rumsfeld’s words into poetry. Not bad.

Greenspan gave us irrational exuberance. Remember those days? Those cryptic warnings that the economy was behaving in ways that the financial overlords couldn’t quite calculate? Funny thing isn’t it that we’re sort of back at the same point, instead of looking down from the peak of an economy,  we’re looking up at the peak of economic challenges that in so many ways are still completely irrational.

But Rumsfeld still can guide is a bit here, he nailed the reality that people just want to believe things regardless of what the facts say.

You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t happen.

It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t—
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

This leads us to those irational people believing things because they heard it somewhere. We see it here on this blog in the comments. People posting clearly wrong information that they believe is accurate. Facts don’t seem to phase them. We see it in politics all the time. Try having a rational conversation about health care reform without invoking socialism, death panels or how we don’t need government run healthcare. Is it such a lost art to actually read the bills that our congresscritters actually vote on?

The current bill in the senate is not about health care reform. To have a bill about health care reform, the contents of that bill would address stuff like heath care. Insurance coverage is not health care. It’s a financial transaction. And that’s the philosophical issue that plenty of people irrationally debate because they don’t want to deal with the facts.

You don’t see people wandering the streets with tea bags hanging from their heads over the government regulations capping profits allowed on electricity. It wasn’t all that long ago that California decided to go the “free market” route to see what would happen to electrical rates if they were deregulated. California earned its rolling balckouts for that experiment and a recent study reported in the New York Times showed that electricity rates were higher (2001-2007) in those states that deregulated their energy markets than those states that did not.

An unregulated healthcare industry has given us higher medical costs. Those medical costs are concealed from us every which way. To force medical practitioners to disclose what they charge on an hourly rate would be the simplest one line health care reform bill that congress could ever pass. Who knows what the unintended consequences would be! It would be, as Rumsfeld would say, an unknown unknown.

In Norwalk, we have the irrational conspiracists. With every issue that meanders its way through City Hall, our irrational conspiracists believe that they alone will uncover some monumental plot that somehow endangers the world. Thre’s a similarity between all these righteous individuals that want to convince the world of their moral superiority.  And maybe it can be summed up by a bumper sticker, call it today’s philosophical question — If electricity is produced by electrons, is morality produced by morons?